What is the best way to educate internal stakeholders on Account Based Marketing in order to accurately highlight the potential benefits to the organization as a whole and to their individual teams’ functions?

This question has a lot to unpack. Influencing change takes a LOT of time, but I would recommend starting with first principles.

3 things I would start with:

• I gotta say marketing sure did a good job of marketing ourselves! However, “ABM” is not a marketing thing; it’s a holistic revenue strategy. The first thing I usually do is internally rebrand “Accunt-Based Marketing” to be a target account strategy.
• “Seek first to understand.” That will mean building relationships cross-functionally to establish trust and credibility. You’ll need key stakeholders to advocate for this strategy when you’re not in the room. Understand what’s important to those teams first: whether sales, e-staff, revenue ops, customer success, and product.
• With Sales & Customer Success: Learn how they are approaching their accounts today. What’s working well for them, what do they need help with? What account insights can you surface that they wouldn’t otherwise have?
• With Product / Product Marketing: How does the voice of the customer inform product development? What market trends are you seeing from your ICP?
• With revenue ops: Depending on the maturity of the organization, you’ll need their alignment to identify ICP criteria to build out target account lists and partner on campaign measurement. This account-centric view will require a different way of measuring traditional lead > opportunity reporting. Can we measure account engagement today?
• For Finance: You’ll need their support for any new budget, which means you’ll need to do some math to speak their language. Can you show them customer acquisition costs (CAC) for target accounts vs. non-target accounts?
• Then, you’ll likely need to show results before you tell. Introduce an experiment that you can manage without fancy technology. Start with a hypothesis around a very crisply defined account list, brainstorm with others around a mix of tactics / messages / channels that you can measure, and chip away to learn what works. Share progress often.

Go to market as ONE team with your sales counterpart.

Ensure the accounts you are targeting is 100% aligned with sales strategy. Your sales team is going to change courses during the quarter/mid-year; pivot with them and ensure you are always aligning to their top priority accounts.

Educate your organization by highlighting the impact that ABM will have to the business.

1. What’s the revenue impact we are driving - early indicators include what’s our contribution to pipe generation.

2. How are we helping our seller build relationships? These can be measured in the form of marketing responses or event attendance or executive engagement from decision makers in our ABM accounts (ie. VP+).

3. How are we strengthen our account data with contact acquisition & contact enrichment/cleaning? Not only are we driving new contacts for the sellers to build new relationships with but is marketing doing to 1) ensure data is the most up-to-date (trash data in = trash data out!) and 2) identifying the “change agents” or decisions that are advocates of your brand who can then become a champion for you during a deal.

Then, come up with a framework on how ABM is going to drive engagement, pipe generation and revenue together with your sales leadership.

Here’s a sample framework to help you think through your ABM strategy:

1. 1 to 1 account journeys: Account planning should be done for each account. This includes leveraging third party data (think Bombora, Leadspace, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, etc) and/or research around each buyer within the account, key opportunities and objectives for your account within the fiscal year (i.e. is your account looking into adopting generative AI into their business processes this year, are they looking to modernize their customer service/call center technology, etc). Equip your sellers and account teams with the right homework so you can help them strengthen their account planning.

2. Be a trusted partner with your accounts team: Partner with your accounts team and ensure you understand their goals and objectives for the quarter/year. Your job is to complement your programs to their strategy. This goes without saying, but ensure every program you launch ties back to business outcomes: (in reference to my measurement framework above) 1) what is your pipe generation and revenue impact? 2) How many marketing responses have you generated with key decisions makers (i.e VP+) in the account and lastly, 3) how has your new contact strategy translate to more sales activities and ultimately, pipe generation and revenue.

3. Quarterbacking with the rest of the marketing team: you can’t create all the marketing CTAs on your own and you need to rely on your marketing counterparts to drive focus for your ABM accounts as well. Partner with your field marketers to ensure your ABM accounts are getting priority at executive events. Work with product marketers and ensure you have the right sales enablement and product demos that you can include in your journeys. Collaborate with the campaigns team and leverage content and assets so you can easily customize and make it work for your ABM journeys. Marketing is a team sport and you cannot scale and win alone.

Host a lunch and learn. Give people free lunch or a snack or something to attend.

Then tell a story. Don't present facts and figures.

If you're new to storytelling, try using ChatGPT or Bard. Here's a sample prompt:

"Using the classic story structure, write me an outline to explain why account based marketing is a strategic benefit to a B2B company. Give me an explanation, with no fluff or extra words, for each of the seven main parts of the story including the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, dénouement, and themes."

I tried it and the output wasn't bad.

I treat my internal stakeholders the same as I do any customer. I seek to understand what matters to them, what jobs to be done they have, and then I position my proposals to ensure I address those. For the most part when you need a teams support in any kind of marketing it's because they also have a vested interest in the result.

As an example. If the team is going after a very specific set of accounts and needs the PMM org to provide some content specific to that segment I ask my team to first do the research. What do we have already that meets the needs? (Job to be done: create net new content that helps further meet customer needs and pain points) What are the gaps between what we have and what we think we need? (Job to be done: align content to audiences and their needs, don't be too broad) How can the output created drive value beyond this specific campaign? (Job to be done: maximize the impact of your work, create as much derivative work or reuse as possible).

One other tip here, make a habit of thanking and giving credit to stakeholders who participate in your campaigns. When they can easily see the value they are driving you'll find over time that it becomes much easier to get support.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is not intended to be used solely by one department. It is a cross-functional company strategy with heavy influence from sales. Here are a few examples of how to gain buy-in:

• Create an ABM playbook that consolidates the feedback of collaborators, including sales, marketing, revenue operations, customer success, and other stakeholders.
• Host a lunch and learn session and walk through the playbook. Answer questions and take the time to clearly articulate the value and desired outcomes.
• Provide use cases that help tell the story of the potential of ABM and how to gauge success.
• You'll find that ongoing education is necessary as new tools and approaches emerge. Be open to answering questions and collaborating on the strategy.

By following these steps, you can effectively gain buy-in for your ABM strategy and ensure that all stakeholders understand the value and potential outcomes of the program.